In the following years, users will access their data from a variety of devices, operating systems and applications. The CloudSpaces project advocates for a paradigm shift from application-centric to person-centric models where users will retake the control of their information. CloudSpaces aims to create the next generation of open Personal Clouds using three main building blocks: CloudSpaces Share, CloudSpaces Storage and CloudSpaces Services.

CloudSpaces Share will deal with Interoperability and privacy issues. The infrastructure must ensure privacy-aware data sharing from other Personal Clouds. It must overcome existing vendor lock-in risks thanks to open APIs, metadata standards, personal data ontologies, and portability guarantees. CloudSpaces Storage takes care of scalable data management of heterogeneous storage resources. In particular, users retaking control of their information means that users can decide where their data is stored and how applications and users can access their information. This new scenario clearly requires novel adaptive replication and synchronization schemes dealing with aspects like load, failures, network heterogeneity and desired consistency levels.

Finally, CloudSpaces Services provides a high level service infrastructure for third-party applications that can benefit from the Personal Cloud model. Our novel application model will offer data management (3S: Store, Sync, Share), data-application interfaces, and a persistence service to heterogeneous applications with different degrees of consistency and synchronization.

The project results will be validated thanks to contributions to three main open source projects: Ubuntu One Personal Cloud, OpenStack Swift Cloud storage solution, and eyeOS Personal Web Desktop. We will leverage the massive communities of these projects to disseminate CloudSpaces achievements.